March of the Lemmings

by Stewart Lee

  Even stand-up has been weaponised by fake news

  30 April 2017

  Last Sunday,1 Le Pen was predicted a 92 per cent landslide; Serge Gainsbourg’s zombie corpse, barely discernible from his living form, rose from the grave and endorsed the Front National; and, apparently, ten-hour queues meant it wasn’t worth busy French metropolitan liberals turning up to vote, as they would not then have time to drink absinthe in Saint-Denis, dance with Moulin Rouge showgirls and pursue their extramarital affairs before bed.2

  If you’d googled the word ‘France’ in the hours up to the first round of the French election, you’d have found fake news stories, skewed in support of the anti-EU far right, all over Twitter and Facebook. Writing in this newspaper in February, Carole Cadwalladr revealed how one-third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was generated by automated ‘bots’ programmed to trend pro-Leave topics,3 a story that should have gained more ground except that, well, it wouldn’t, would it, obviously.

  Sometime around the weekend of 1 April, the comedian Marcus Brigstocke blogged that members of his audiences ‘walked out every night’ when he mocked Brexit. Within days, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, Breitbart, the Spectator, ShortList and Spiked all had fake stories suggesting Brexiteer audiences were also deserting en masse shows by me, specifically, and a subsequent host of unnamed ‘far left London comedians’ (Breitbart). ‘It’s nice of them to wait until the end and applaud while doing it,’ my tour manager noted, drily. But by now, the fake-news tsunami was blowin’ hard.4

  The crappy male-grooming freesheet ShortList was among many sources that decontextualised self-aware jokes I had made about my perceived liberal impotence in the face of Brexit, even going so far as to congratulate me for ‘substantial self-awareness’. Here and on stage, I parody the Right’s expectations of liberal comedy, only to have them thrown back at me, free of their moorings, to confirm its ignorant assumptions. In Brexit Britain, we are post-fact, post-irony and post-nuance.

  To its credit, the Daily Express changed its timid assertion that I was receiving ‘scornful glances’ from audiences to my suggested correction: ‘Comedian Stewart Lee, in contrast, claims his career has only been strengthened by Brexit. He has been performing nationwide, with a set that includes twenty minutes of anti-Brexit material and describes Leave voters as “c***s”.’ Like my twin heroes Eminem and Christ, ‘I am whatever you say I am!’

  I emailed the first twenty-five stand-up comedians in my address book to ask them about any experiences of doing Brexit material, which is perhaps the sort of thing you could do if you were a journalist covering the story for a newspaper as part of your actual real job.

  Thirteen responded immediately, all but one of whom work nationwide, and all had done Brexit material. The survey comprised, to my tremendous satisfaction, only three heterosexual white English men, alongside a female Irish immigrant, a female white English feminist pensioner, a Northern Irish Catholic heterosexual man, a Jewish American immigrant, a bisexual Englishman, a British Baha’i man, a British Muslim woman, a Canadian immigrant heterosexual man, a white Scottish male Buddhist and a British Hindu man who has nonetheless been vilified for looking like a Muslim in an Internet meme.5

  A majority of ten of the stand-up comedians took specifically anti-Brexit positions. ‘I disagree that it’s career-ending. Comedians have coped with massive political changes before and there’s comfort in using your skills to meet new demands,’ said the Irishwoman, philosophically. ‘I’ve yet to see a reaction to a Brexit joke even ruin a gig, let alone a career. I know there’s a huge change in the country’s attitudes but I still think there’s more non-cunts than cunts,’ the Northern Irish Protestant man concluded, with characteristic regional ferocity.

  ‘I had no idea my career was over if I did Brexit material. I thought things were going quite well. My experience is that audiences expect it,’ reflected the Muslim woman. The Muslim-looking Hindu comedian, however, revealed that a fight had broken out in Leamington Spa during his anti-Brexit routine, but with shades of high-level UKIP meetings, it had been between two Leave voters who differed over whether he should have been allowed to make jokes about Brexit at all.

  I looked at the Twitter identities that had driven the spread of the fake story. Was ‘Brexpats’ a real thing or a lie platform generated by a pro-Brexit data company such as Cambridge Analytica, which currently features in an investigation into whether it gave undeclared free cyber-assistance to Leave.EU? Was someone called ‘Luca Saucedo’ really interested in the supposed failure of Brexit comedy, when the rest of his Twitter timeline concerned beachwear and phone wallets? Did ‘Luca Saucedo’ even exist? Was he an anti-EU Kremlin bot, perhaps infected with some kind of sandal and swim-trunk virus?

  By the end of the fake-news week, the anti-EU Daily Telegraph, as if to shore up its dubious story, ran a consolidating opinion piece by ‘Brexit comedian Simon Evans’. But Evans immediately admitted on Twitter: ‘The article as I wrote it is more about acknowledging nuance, perspective and not taking consensus in the room for granted. However, a lot of the nuance has, predictably, been stripped and I’m not entirely happy with how it reads . . Just wanted to distance myself from “Brexit comedian”, which wasn’t the point to me at all.’6

  Bizarrely, the more moderate Twitter version of ‘Simon Evans’ was now in conflict with the hard Brexit ‘Simon Evans’ identity, created by the Telegraph through judicious subediting, misrepresentative headlines and manipulative captioning of irrelevant photo montages.

  I emailed what I assume is the real Simon Evans, who likes to remind his Twitter followers that they are allowed to find me ‘not particularly funny’, nearly three weeks ago now to ask him if he had been solicited by the Daily Telegraph, with the brief of substantiating its position, but he does not respond. Does ‘Simon Evans’ even exist? Are he and sandal- and swimwear-loving Luca Saucedo different manifestations of the same algorithmically generated, Putin-backed, anti-EU mechanism, weaponising7 falsehoods to destabilise Europe and crush the saboteurs?

  Or am I the fictional entity, brain dead somewhere on life support, dreaming of nightly applause for my anti-Brexit witticisms as I pass 100,000 tour ticket sales, when in fact I made a failed suicide attempt weeks ago, sick of being booed off from Land’s End to John O’Groats, just as the papers said?

  And who are you, reading this and choosing to retweet it? Are you real? Would you even know if you weren’t? Are you a program created to think like a person? Am I? Is this how it is now? For ever? Fake news all the way down?

  This is a made up story. Susie

  Virtue signalling. Cranky Mac

  It does not matter what topic Stewart Lee talks about, Brexit or not, the sad fact he is just not funny. Northoflondon

  Poor old Stuart Lee far to clever for his own good, he doesn’t seem to realise that his time has come and gone It’s there 1979 moment when the northern working class comedians became obsolete so to June 2016 marked the point when the metropolitan liberal elite became obsolete Looking forward to seeing Stuart Lee on a Home Counties version of Bullseye. Sheffield Monkey

  Like most up themselves left wing liberal comedians they can dish it out but can’t take it back. They seem to become easily offended when some members of their audience decide to walk out on them for not enjoying their material, actually its no big deal and certainly not worthy of a article when someone so sensitive starts crying, bellyaching and making a big fuss about it. Cyrilthewasp

  Lefty comedian in not being remotely funny shocka! He is no jim davidson or bernard Manning … I will give you that. Marcus Wolfson

  Lee seems to have forgotten that hes’ a professional entertainer, whose sole job is to entertain, rather than offer political theory lectures. Soupdraggon69

  Stewart Lee has more in common with Thatcher then even he knows! He is part of the Neo-liberal elite and he does not even know it. Or maybe he does as it seems good for business? I hope he pays his f
ull whack of income tax from all this money he makes? David Coalman

  Perhaps Stewart Lee should do a double act with his tour manager. With Lee as the straight man. CM Rowney

  Celebrity Observer columnist in ‘telling his readership exactly what they want to hear in order to carry on feeling embattled yet superior’ shock. Pete CW

  I used to run a pub in Brighton and we had a regular comedy night to raise money for medicines sans frontieres. Simon Munnery was supposed to be headlining and pulled out last minute as he had double booked. Marcus Brigstocke was doing a show at the Dome/Corn Exchange that night. After he finished his gig he came up to the pub, did the headline set, refused to take the fee and got the train home. Proudsonofduck

  Only Stewart Lee could have the most diverse, multi-cultural, liberal and progressive email address list in the UK. Youcantalk

  Lee talks like a North London musher from a council estate when he’s a public schoolboy who went to Oxford. Does that mean he’s a fraud? I assume that since he’s lived in London so long that when he’s practising his ‘working class’ accent in the mirror every morning that he’s unconsciously transformed himself from a phoney Brum to a phoney Cockney. What a geezer! Dropped ‘h’s and glottal stops all over the place from a 50 year old Oxbridge-educated public schoolboy were surprising and strongly suggested the type of left-wing pretension and phoniness that are so valued by rich socialists and their admirers. QuarkMusterMark

  1 The 2017 French election.

  2 All these fake stories were placed on French social media in the run-up to the election.

  3 And this was only the first blast of an investigation that should have discredited the referendum.

  4 Surely somebody, somewhere along the chain of falsehoods, could have checked whether this news story was accurate in relation to what it said about me. If I was paranoid, I would think that the Leave machine and the newspapers that serve it wanted to emasculate comedy, because they saw it as some kind of threat to their false narrative. Whenever I am involved in a news story, I find it is usually inaccurate. Then I start to wonder about news generally.

  5 Obviously I tweaked the selection of people I emailed so that it was ludicrously socially diverse in order to parody and confirm the prejudices of people who hate me and post below the line on Observer columns accusing me of virtue signalling, which is exactly what it did, thus: ‘Tremendously impressed with the diversity of Stuart’s address book, and with his forthrightness in revealing it. Freddy Starmer’

  6 It is always exciting to be asked to write something by a newspaper, and who can blame ‘Brexit comedian’ Simon Evans, who prefers ‘Alexei Sayle’s acerbic bile’ to my ‘nuanced pontificating’, for naively agreeing to cooperate with a paper as dishonest as the Daily Telegraph without insisting on the proper checks and balances. But cool heads must prevail, and I always ask for approval over edits, and even over any photographs or illustrations, as these too can swing the way a piece reads. Even the Guardian has, on occasion, stiffed me with an editorialised photo caption. Fake news!

  7 I was going through a phase of enjoying using the word ‘weaponise’ because, recently, while walking past a building site, my blind eyes had misread a sign that said ‘We Apologise For Any Inconvenience’ as the far more inspiring ‘Weaponise Any Inconvenience’. I think Weaponise Any Inconvenience is a genuine philosophy for art and life.

  How a sex robot ended up on the One Show sofa

  14 May 2017

  Artificially intelligent humanoid sexual partners are now commercially available. And indeed, I have often wondered if I myself am in fact one such ‘sex robot’. My lovers always disengage from me in silently satisfied wonder, and rarely request second encounters, having had their expectations soul-shatteringly exceeded, their sexual futures rendered endlessly disappointing. I’m joking of course! I have been married for twelve years. There is nothing to see here.

  But once, as a young adventurer, I crossed America by bus, arriving in Seattle in September 1994, three years after Peak Grunge, just in time to see the genre winding down with a local band called Peach, at the Crocodile Café. The ATM ran dry that night and a scenester at the bar bailed me out with the offer of his sofa. He seemed normal enough by the standards of the day – beanie hat, goatee beard and pierced nipples poking through a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Public Castration Is a Good Idea’.1

  To say that Matt’s apartment was a surprise would be an understatement. The walls were lined not with Tad and Mudhoney posters, but with the suspended forms of life-size naked female dolls, of troubling anatomical accuracy, which he had made himself. ‘Don’t worry,’ Matt said, ‘I’m not crazy or weird. I hope one day to make these dolls into artificially intelligent sex robots. Imagine having your own erotic mechanical slaves! Nachos?’

  Last month, I saw Matt for the first time in twenty-three years, this time in a Guardian feature about the ethical dilemmas created by a newly available luxury product he had developed: life-size, artificially intelligent sex robots. Then, suddenly, events here at home made me realise I needed to speak to Matt McMutton again, and not as a potential customer!

  Last week, Sarah Vine, who is married to Michael Gove, opened the scab-encrusted blowhole of her Daily Mail column once more, this time comparing Brigitte Macron, the wife of the new French president, whom he met when he was her fifteen-year-old drama pupil, to the alleged child rapist Roman Polanski, and suggesting, not entirely unreasonably, that had the couple’s roles been reversed their marriage would seem ‘grotesque’.2

  But Sarah Vine is married to Michael Gove. And Michael Gove is, in turn, married to Sarah Vine. And the thought of either of them being married to anyone, let alone each other, is also grotesque, despite Vine being an acceptable four months her adopted husband’s senior.

  And, uniquely, the notion of the Goves’ union remains equally grotesque, even when their ages are reversed to be more in line with those of a normal partnership. The image of a cluster of toads spawning in a dew pond is more pleasing to the mind’s eye, for unlike the dissembling Goves, the assembling toads are merely following their own natures, in accordance with the watchmaker’s perfect mechanism, amphibian messengers of Christ’s majesty eternal.3

  Of course, I appreciate that the previous four sentences are unpleasant. They are deliberately so, as a mirror image of the Vine sensibility that inspired them. The cultural theorist James Naughtie explained to me on the Today programme, while screwing up his stupid red face like a baboon eating a thistle, that an earlier column of mine about the Goves and their ilk was ‘poisonous’. But to say a column about the Goves is poisonous is unnecessary, like saying that a slow-motion film of a cat vomiting is nauseating.4

  It is foolish of politicians and their guff-trumpets – and this is what Vine is here – to score points off their rivals’ choice of spouse, especially if you are Sarah Vine. And it is even more foolish to do so when Theresa May parades her husband Philip before the cameras of The One Show. The poor banker came across not as strong and stable, but like a tortured hostage forced at gun-point to tell the people at home how kindly he is being treated.

  Eighty-two kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls are free! But when will Philip May be free?5 And will he have any strong hope of readjusting to a stable life, where he is spared the endless repetition of the words ‘strong’ and ‘stable’?

  And why is Theresa May’s lower jaw permanently locked into the same sort of jutting/munching shape Eric Morecambe’s made when theatrically sucking a pipe? She has no pipe. How will Mrs May’s imaginary pipe face play with the Europeans? They will say, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’6

  I am no international trade negotiator (who is?), but can it be prudent, as we enter into talks with a newly united EU, determined to reaffirm its Enlightenment values, for Sarah Vine, one of our chief Brexiteers, and the spouse of a former cabinet member, to compare the French president’s wife to an alleged child rapist? How will this affect barista visas, roaming mobile-phone charges and th
e future dimensions of Toblerones?

  However offensive the French first couple’s relationship, it at least seemed genuine. But, to me, there was a strange, haunted, empty quality to both Michael Gove and Philip May, the latter having vouchsafed to The One Show that he ‘quite liked ties, although I’m not wearing one this evening’.7 This indefinable absence of the flame of being makes the idea of a relationship involving either Mr Gove or Mr May oddly implausible.

  Troubled by a mysterious worry, on Thursday I called Matt. ‘The project stalled soon after we met,’ he recalled. ‘It was initially too difficult to replicate the unpredictable workings of the complex female brain. But men’s brains were easy. They just thought about sports and neckties, so I turned out a couple of male dolls as practice. I only make the female dolls now, but for a few months in the mid-’90s I had a small client list of successful rich women who wanted compliant partners. They didn’t mind if their sex robots had no real personality to speak of, as long as they’d take out the trash and eat the occasional tuna taco way down south in Dixie, if you get my drift. Mumble in the moss, man, mumble in the moss!’

  ‘You don’t still have that list, do you, Matt?’ I asked. ‘Sure.’ The two names from the old customer base that shocked me most meant nothing to Matt McMutton. But then he wasn’t a follower of British politics. When and where and why, I wondered, had the sinister switches been made? ‘So,’ Matt continued, five thousand miles away in the Pacific Northwest, as the realisation dawned and I sat down in stunned horror, ‘you in the market for a sex robot? Or are you still dating humans, old school? Faggot!’